When the largest western exhibition of Tetsuya Ishida’s paintings went on display at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, it was “extremely popular, especially with young people,” said Teresa Velazquez, the exhibition’s curator.
Looking at that same exhibition, installed now at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, it’s easy to see why — and why the Japanese painter, who died when he was hit by a train at age 31, has been labelled a “cult artist.”
Ishida’s paintings, at once fantastical and documentary, depict personal isolation within a mechanized society. A shopper has conveyor belt arms. Student heads become microscopes. Workers at a lunch counter are fed — or re-tooled, perhaps — with industrial machinery.
“His vision is so ahead of its time in many respects,” said Gina Pollara, the chief operating officer of the Lincoln Park exhibition space.
The Japan he depicts in these paintings from years around the turn of the Millennium is crushingly efficient, relentlessly conformist. People are packaged like factory products, labelled with brand names, churned out on an assembly line.
Through all of them there is this central character, a mostly expressionless young man said to look like the artist but not meant to be, in Ishida’s view, a self-portrait. The character seems adrift in these scenarios, a little numb, aware of being acted upon but taking little action himself. “Self-Portrait of Other” is the show’s title.
There are elements of manga and anime throughout the work, and of Ben Shahn, but they also summon Dali and Kafka and every other artist who has ever wondered where humanity fits in a world made efficient by technology.
At a panel discussion of Ishida’s work earlier this month, E. Taylor Atkins, a specialist in modern Japan and assistant chair of Northern Illinois University’s history department, said it was important to place Ishida in the context of modern Japan.
Following the post-war economic boom and then crash, young workers were in a state of “precarity,” Atkins said, and were described as a “lost generation.” “A lot of young people could not count on the kind of stability that their parents or grandparents had experienced,” he said.
“One of the things that I see in common with Ishida’s work and the popular culture, particularly manga comics and anime animated films is a sort of cautionary, sometimes very pessimistic vision of where Japan’s technophilia of the post-war era had gotten them.”
One manifestation of this: The cyborg figure, a human body “that melds with or is invaded by, violated by or mutated by technology,” Atkins said.
The alienation, pessimism and hopelessness that Ishida tapped into before his death in 2005 were only amplified after March, 2011, when an earthquake, tidal wave and nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan eroded trust in business, technology and government, the historian noted.
And, indeed, Ishida has become famous in Japan posthumously, the panelists said, as people have found lasting resonance in the work.
It was also, it must be said, augmented by the life story. Ishida was apparently from a well-off family but had no interest in pursuing the kind of safe career his parents envisioned for him. He was devoted to his art, friends and curators say in the exhibition catalog, and his art was particularly detailed and handmade, labor intensive, figurative — an anachronism amid the contemporary art of his time.
“Ishida detested Takashi Murakami,” writes his art school friend Isamu Hirabayashi, referring to the Japanese pop artist who was a contemporary and has gone on to global acclaim (and a popular 2017 exhibition at the MCA Chicago). “‘Where’s the art in Murakami’s work?’ Ishida would ask. ‘His art is all just a marketing ploy.'”
Also in the catalog, Kuniichi Uno, analyzing Ishida’s art, calls him “an enfant terrible of his time and place, even if he (his person and his art) seems rather subdued, with nothing terrible about him. His caricatures of the society that surrounded him were done with a black humor that goes beyond irony, attaining a perversity and cruelty that can’t be ignored.”
What seem like minimal happenings, Uno writes, are in reality “tragedies and catastrophes. Every painting is an event.”
His friend Hirabayachi says that Ishida was drawn to suicide in the artists and art he admired. Yet nobody seems to officially say that his own death, in 2005, was a suicide, although it seems to be assumed between the lines.
Is that part of Ishida’s allure, the means of death causing people to read even more into the paintings?
“Of course it draws attention,” said Velazquez, the curator, who is head of exhibitions at the Spanish museum. “But I think people get involved in the work because it’s powerful, because it really depicts things people can relate to.”
Still, it’s hard not to notice a shift in Ishida’s work after about 2000, at least in the paintings on display at Wrightwood 659.
The earlier work has a kind of bravado in the merging of human and mechanized forms, or human and insect. The artist is showing off his vidid, always fresh visual imagination, even as some of his themes are not wholly surprising: An artist critiques the conformist culture around him.
But in the later art, the criticism seems to turn inward and the emotions deepen. The paintings take on a haunted quality and a sense of personal isolation pervades. In “Hothouse,” his figure melds with a radiator, it arm draped around a sleeping child who also looks like him amidst a tableau of smoked cigarettes and empty beer cans. In “Return Journey,” his face stares at the viewer except all the features have been replaced by a black hole, and in it a small child sits, looking blankly over a shoulder at the viewer.
Ishida said he wasn’t making self-portraits, but these final-years paintings feel so personal it’s hard to know what else they could be.
“Tetsuya Ishida: Self-Portrait of Other” runs through Dec. 14 at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood, Chicago. Standard tickets are $16, although the institution does release some free tickets on Mondays. Wrightwood659.0rg or 773-437-6601.
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @stevenkjohnson
